A. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to electronic messaging technology, and more particularly, to analyzing electronic messages and grouping them in threads, which may also be known as discussions or conversations.
B. Background of the Invention
As the personal and business use of electronic messaging, such as email, continues to increase, improved applications for storing, archiving and retrieval of electronic messages are needed. Areas where such technology is important include investigatory fields that need to search through a large number of electronic messages that match a particular search topic. For example, electronic messages may need to be searched and retrieved for compliance with specific corporate obligations or discovery requests that arise during the course of litigation.
One way in which electronic messages may be organized is by grouping electronic messages into threads. A thread is comprised of one or more electronic messages that make up a chain of the correspondence. A thread starts with an initial electronic message and includes any subsequent replies to or forwards from either the initial electronic message or any other message in the thread. One problem with the current applications that group electronic messages into threads is that messages are grouped into threads based purely on the subject of the electronic messages.
Grouping electronic messages based purely on the subject may result in grouping electronic messages that have no relation to one another into a thread. For example, each department of a company may have quarterly meetings to discuss problems or the status of projects for a particular quarter. Each department may send an electronic message, such as an email message to the members of the department with the agenda for the meeting. However, if each department uses the subject “Quarterly Meeting” as the subject of the message, current applications may group all of the meetings from the various groups into a single thread.
Grouping electronic message in this way may not be problematic in a single inbox environment, since only electronic messages sent to the inbox will be included in the thread. However, when viewing electronic messages from multiple inboxes, electronic messages that have no relation to one another and which may include different sets of correspondents may be grouped together in a single thread simply because they share a common subject. These messages may have nothing to do with one another and may increase the difficulty of searching electronic messages rather than making it simpler to locate electronic messages relevant to a particular search query.